Monday, October 21, 2013

NYT Debate on Whether to Study Aboard or Not

A great debate on NYT about whether students should study aboard or not. 

See the debate here.  

When there are all sorts of quantitative evaluation papers of all sorts of educational programs in the econ of ed literature, no one ever measured the "cost-effectiveness" or "impacts on learning / earnings" of study abroad experience-   it is indeed hard to construct a "randomized sample" for a good casual study, but it is definitely a good direction for research. My colleagues at the Minds Abroad research team recently are presenting some findings about how study abroad experience would impact on students' cultural adaptability and performances in school at several national conferences. It is based on a fairly small-sized data, but there are interesting insights about the gender gaps in learning, location preference, etc. that we observed. I will post some of the findings (infographic) when we make some updates with feedbacks from recent conferences.